CFP: [20th] PCA/Science Fiction Panel

full name / name of organization:

Jennifer Kelso Farrell

contact email:

jkelsofarrell@gmail.com

"'Cognitive Estrangement: How Language is Science Fiction's Most PowerfulTechnology"

This panel seeks papers that explore the relationship between the sciencefiction reader and the science fiction text. Science fiction scholar DarkoSuvin determined that science fiction is a mode of literature that at oncesets the reader in an alien environment while simultaneously making thatenvironment seem scientifically plausible. The reader's seeminglycontradictory situation is not remedied merely through detaileddescriptions of scientific terms, but is accomplished through the very useof language, what Samuel Delany calls the subjunctive. In "About FiveThousand One Hundred and Seventy-Five Words" Delany defines the subjunctiveas ". . .the tension on the thread of meaning that runs between word andobject." Both Suvin and discuss the experienceof the reader as an oscillation between the reader's known world and thescience fiction reality which displaces the reader's reality by means ofnarrative mechanisms. In this sense language is the genre's most powerfultechnology as language not only serves to explore unfamiliar worlds andconcepts, but also creates that unfamiliarity.

Possible paper topics can include, but are not limited to, the use of l33tspeak and other languages that cross over from the virtual world to thereal world or from novels into the real world (or some combination of thattype of linguistic transference); a look at religious or messianic languageapplied to technology and the resulting implications; language as a meansof isolation or control of an individual or group; novels or authors whoremove personal pronouns and/or gender specific pronouns from the text andhow that removal affects the reader; or how other forms of linguisticcognitive estrangement work on both text and reader.